You can’t let a date like today’s go by without some acknowledgement.
It also means that the closing date for my September Crossword Centre puzzle Minor Variations is well and truly past, so I can now share the setter’s blog for it.
I went to vote today, even though the New Zealand general election is technically next Saturday. This year early voting has been extended to rather more venues than previous elections – some opened last Saturday, in fact, though the school hall a couple of hundred metres down our road only got going this weekend. It was noticeably busier than previous times, and it remains to be seen (another week or so, that would be) whether turnout is affected by the change. It certainly felt more relaxed, and more likely to encourage people to turn up. Whether many will turn up with a cat, as we did, is more moot.
Also this week I finished the latest Robert Galbraith thriller Troubled Blood. There has been a lot in the press and elsewhere about the sexual politics of the book, but it’s a little hard to see what’s going on. The character in question (who may as well be wearing a red herring suit as fancy dress given the conventions of the genre) is a nasty piece of work for sure (and based on a real American case), but sadly definitely a male heterosexual. There’s a lot reminiscent of The Satanic Verses in the to and fro of “The book says this” and “Actually, no it doesn’t”.
However, JK has reached into the Lazy Box compartment marked ‘evil genius’ and made him – guess what? That’s right, a crossword solver. What has she got against cruciverbalists?
And I can follow up my hypothesis of a forthcoming Toughie with a date: 15 October.
I have not read this book, nor do I think I will. Troubled Blood sounds like it is more ‘troubled writing’. Unless of course it’s meant to be that way, which somehow I doubt.
Maybe, you could set a crossword with a theme of that particular genre?